End-to-end encryption for 1-to-1 and group instant messaging

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Linphone is used by major actors in the security domain, who chose to leverage on a mature and robust open source softphone to build their custom proprietary solution for secure voice/video calls and instant messaging.

It has proven to be a legitimate candidate as it supports open standards and state-of-the-art end-to-end ciphering algorithms.

With our latest release of Linphone for iOS and Android (4.1), we capitalize on the group chat functionality that we have developed over the past year, by bringing end-to-end encryption for both one-to-one and group instant messages.

Linphone users with sip.linphone.org accounts can now :

  • create end-to-end encrypted text conversations with one or more participants
  • from the conversations list, clearly differentiate not-encrypted conversations from encrypted ones, thanks to a shield icon and the number of stars on it
  • upgrade the security level of a text conversation from one star (security level 1) to two stars (security level 2), by making calls to authenticate participants
  • be notified when a fraudulent usage is detected (security alert), directly from the conversations list and within the conversation
  • view the security level of each device of each participant in a conversation

For this purpose, we have implemented our own end-to-end encryption library for IM, named LIME (Linphone Instant Messaging Encryption). 
More information is coming soon!

Please note that these end-to-end encryption capabilities are limited to sip.linphone.org accounts, and that LIME is excluded from Linphone/Liblinphone proprietary licenses and sold separately.

Contact sales@belledonne-communications.com if you are interested in integrating end-to-end encryption into your secure IM project.